Dark Lords of Nerima FAQ
So the genesis of this little post is simply that I've seen a couple questions come up repeatedly with regard to the Dark Lords of Nerima series, and I figured that if a lot of people were reviewing with them in mind, there might be even more people who had these same questions as well. Particularly with regard to more obscure references to minor details of the different storylines being crossed over. And so I just took a little bit of time and compiled some of the biggest questions that I remember getting, and wrote up the answers to them, in case it might end up being useful to any reader who happened to have any questions. Hope you enjoy! Anyway, to kick things off, let's start out with... If Queen Beryl really had that many youma, how did the Sailor Senshi win against her in the original story? Well, the thing is, the first two fics in the "Dark Lords" series really weren't those kind of stories to begin with. There's two main approaches a story can take when it's set at some point in time inside an established canon. One is the "AU" route, making it a "what if?" kind of story. (For example, what if aliens had invaded during World War II?) The second approach is the "interquel" route. Instead of changing what happens after it in the canon, it tells stories set during places and times that the canon doesn't cover. (For example, a story about some WWII spies foiling a plot that would have otherwise given Hitler the atomic bomb, with the result that--thanks to their efforts--WWII ends exactly the way we know it did from history, instead of Germany winning.) The first two fics in the "Dark Lords" series fall into the latter category. Beryl having a large youma force is entirely canonical; we see a huge throng of them even just in her throne room, in the very scene where she asks for volunteers to fight the Senshi and the DD Girls accept. Then, in the next and final episode of the season... they're just gone. Every last one of them. With no explanation given at all, whatsoever. Where did they go? Why did they leave? Why didn't Beryl keep sending more of them since the first five alone were so devastating to the Senshi? Canon never even breathes a single word on the subject. (And she could hardly help winning if she'd used them; you can't watch the brutal DD Girls episode and tell me that the Senshi would have been just fine against even five more youma. Let alone fifty more youma. Let alone multiple waves of fifty youma.) Well, for the purposes of the "Dark Lords" series, that never-stated reason was, in fact, the threat of the martial artist army. Thus, if Ranma & co. hadn't been there, the story would have had a vastly different ending than the one we're familiar with (and see from a distance through Ranma's perspective at the end of the interlude). Of course, it's not limited to that one battle either. Other examples include how the Darkmistress would still be alive if Mousse hadn't killed her in the battle for Nerima, and she'd be wielding that headpiece, not the DD Girl who inherited it. Similarly, there's Ranma saving Tuxedo Kamen's life at the airport, etc, etc. And of course, with the third fic now, we're officially past the end of canon for both series. So from here on out it's neither an AU or an interquel, but rather a continuation fic... which means all bets are off. Except... are we really past the end of Sailor Moon canon? There's that pesky time-travel business, right? Which brings us to another frequently asked question, namely... Do time travellers in Sailor Moon change the future, or ensure it? There's many different approaches a story can take with respect to time travel. In some cases the future is fixed, and the actions of any time traveller just ends up causing the very future that they came from, even if they try to prevent it. In others, you can actually change the future, while in yet others, all you manage is to shunt yourself over to a parallel timestream where things went differently, while the original still persists. The thing is, it seems pretty clear from a lot of things in Sailor Moon (for example, the fact that the Gates of Time are viewed as so very dangerous) that in their universe time travel takes the second of those three paths. And, consequently that's the one that this fic takes as well. When any person goes back in time, they're changing the future, whether in ways large or small. That means, with Chibi-Usa now in the past, all bets are off. The future will be different than the future we've seen in the "future sequences" to date. How different? Different in what ways? Well, that remains to be seen. But it also means that future people can't necessarily rely on their future knowledge in terms of what effect time travellers will have, since the very sequence of events that they remember can and will be changed by the time traveller's actions. And more importantly, the ripple effect of those actions on others' actions, with even the smallest deviation having the potential to snowball into a massive avalanche of alteration. I do plan on expanding a bit more on the mechanics of how the Gates of Time manage all this in-story, as it becomes important to the characters themselves. (Along with sticky questions like how Chibi-Usa can start to vanish in one instance when the timeline starts changing, but at the same time the "butterfly effect" isn't changing her age and gender every time she so much as exhales in the past.) But for now, the key idea is just simply that the future can change. And in fact, the future will change. Which also leads into a related question about future knowledge, namely... What's up with Tuxedo Kamen having a healing power? Believe it or not, this one is actually canon too, and anime canon, no less. It doesn't show up often, but he does have a healing ability, one that he, for instance, uses in Episode 148 to heal Fisheye. (One of the reasons I made sure to throw it in in an early fight was because he's going to have more opportunities to use it in this fic, and I figured it was an obscure enough detail regarding his powerset that I'd better establish its presence early so it didn't catch people off-guard.) And finally, one more question about abilities and whether they're canonical, namely... Are youma actually that sapient? The funny thing is, I get this issue raised both as a praise and as a criticism. Sometimes it's people praising me for going beyond the "normal" perception of youma in Sailor Moon as "mindless-pure-evil-monsters". Sometimes it's people criticising me for portraying them differently from canon. But actually, it's neither. In point of fact, I can't claim the idea of "portraying magical girl monsters-of-the-day as thinking, feeling creatures with their own goals and society" to be any kind of novel idea of my own. The writers of the Sailor Moon anime beat me to the punch by well over a decade. They didn't bring it to the point of having one of the youma do a Heel Face turn, but it's all there. Youma are clearly intelligent, with their own ideals and desires. One youma, Thetis, actually goes behind Queen Beryl's back to assist Jadeite (with a plan of her own suggestion) because she's in love with him. They have friends, such as Castor and Pollux, and they clearly have lives outside of trying to take over the world. In fact, in referring to the Seven Great Youma, Queen Beryl describes them not as "tools" or even "servants", but rather "allies". In short, yes, canonical youma are very much living, thinking, feeling, sapient beings. I didn't make any of that up, or break any new ground; I'm just following in the footsteps of ground that'd already been broken way back when by one of the original pioneers. The most I did was structure this story so that those preexisting elements were more in the center of events, with the spotlight of attention on them. So if you want to praise someone for challenging the conventions of the magical-girl-sentai-anime genre in that way... then praise the original writers of the Sailor Moon anime, folks who did that even in the midst of pretty much establishing the genre itself. :-) Why does Sailor Pluto still have her Garnet Rod, given that it was broken by Sailor Galaxia toward the end of the Sailor Stars season? There hasn't been a good place to work it into the story so far, but I'm having it that that those kind of "summonable weapons" that materialize out of thin air as part of Senshi attacks/transformations can eventually repair themselves and/or be re-summoned/re-created after being broken. Similarly, I'm not taking away Sailor Saturn's Silence Glaive or Sailor Moon's Final Tiare either, even though both of those got broken by Galaxia in Stars as well. It fits with the pattern of how things like their uniforms and such repair themselves after being damaged. (Not to mention that that kind of gear is also iconic enough that the story wouldn't be much fun to have them deprived of it.) Category:The Dark Lords of Nerima